Article: Programming your first XNA 4.0 game for PC, Xbox 360 & Windows Phone 7: Pong
by Thomas "Mister Helmut" Altenburger
I’d like to introduce the XNA framework to you with this very simple and straightforward tutorial. We will see what XNA is and how its basic features works to continue with the programming of your first game, a simple Pong clone for Windows. At last, we’ll try to convert it to the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7. This tutorial assumes that the readers have a basic C#/.Net understanding. I hope that it will help you to understand the basics of the framework and that it will motivate you to go further in. The article should be suitable to complete beginners in game programming.
About this tutorial: I wrote this tutorial back in the days of XNA 2.0 beta and used it as an introductory course I taught to master degree students. Since then, it evolved to support XNA 4.0 beta with added Window Phone 7 development.
English not being my native language, please forgive and/or report any English oddities.
This tutorial targets XNA 4.0 beta. It will be updated when the final version will be released. It uses some new features of XNA 4.0 so it will not run out-of-the-box on previous XNA version (mainly due to the usage of Viewport.Bounds and changed SpriteBatch.Draw arguments order).